# Urbanization timeline

> A vertical timeline of how the world moved to cities, with a 100-person dot matrix driven by a year slider and regional bars that follow it, on UN data.

A timeline that doubles as a control. The year slider fills a grid of one hundred people and moves the regional bars beside it; every milestone below has a button that jumps the explorer to its year. The dots are plain HTML elements in a CSS grid, the timeline is an ordered list with a pseudo-element for its spine.

## One hundred people

2025world

**58** of every 100 people live in towns and cities

- **Urban
- **Rural

2025

### Urban share by region

2025

Tick: the region's 1950 level. Regions move in five-year steps.

## Milestones

1. 1950

   ### Fewer than three in ten

   28.8% of the world lives in towns and cities. Europe and Oceania already have urban majorities; in Africa and Asia it is about one person in seven.

   ****28.8%Show

2. 1960

   ### South America tips urban

   51.1% of South Americans live in cities by 1960, up from 43.8% a decade earlier. By 2025 the share reaches 85.5%, the highest of any region.

   ****51.1%Show

3. 1960s

   ### Asia stalls

   Asia's urban share barely moves for a decade, from 22.5% in 1960 to 23.6% in 1970, as China sends millions of urban youth to the countryside.

   ****23.6%Show

4. 1975

   ### Oceania peaks

   Oceania's urban share tops out at 72.0% and drifts down after it, to 67.6% in 2025: the one region where the countryside has outgrown the cities for half a century.

   ****72.0%Show

5. 2007

   ### The urban majority

   For the first time, more people live in cities than in the countryside: 50.4% of the world, up from 49.9% the year before.

   ****50.4%Show

6. 2017

   ### Asia crosses half

   Home to more than half the world's people, Asia becomes majority urban, at 50.2% in 2017 after tripling its share since 1950.

   ****50.2%Show

7. 2025

   ### 57.8% and climbing

   Africa, at 46.4%, is the last major region with a rural majority, and its share rose faster than any other region's over the last five years, by 2.1 points.

   ****57.8%Show

## Data

Data table

| Year |
| ---- |

Share of the population living in urban areas, %.

## How it's built

- **The dot matrix** is a hundred `<i>` elements in a ten-column CSS grid; a slider toggles `data-urban` on the first *n* of them, and a transition does the animation.
- **The regional bars** are one SVG redrawn at its real width; they keep their elements between years, so the bars glide instead of jumping.
- **The timeline** is an `<ol>`: the spine is a gradient `::before` on the list, each dot a `::before` on an item, and each progress meter a `--share` custom property.

Source: [UN World Urbanization Prospects](https://population.un.org/wup/) (2025 revision), as compiled by [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization). Urban areas follow each country's own definition, so a town in one country may count as rural in another.